Dr. Jerri Nielsen at the South Pole. (Below) In
the subfreezing dark, ground crew from the Amundsen-Scott station
had only a few minutes to find and recover emergency equipment.

June is the dead of winter at the National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott
South Pole Station-41 people inside the dome, temperatures averaging 80
degrees Fahrenheit below zero, 60-mile-per-hour winds, and around-the-clock
total darkness outside. The nearest human settlement is 800 miles away,
and most years nobody gets in or out between February and November.

On June 17, 1999, NSF headquarters announced that a 47-year-old woman,
later identified as Dr. Jerri Nielsen, the station's physician, had discovered
a lump in her breast. After lengthy consultations with medical experts
in the United States over the next eleven days, a call went out for an
emergency airlift of drugs and diagnostic tools.

Chuck McParland of Berkeley Lab's Information and Computing Sciences
Division immediately volunteered the Lab's assistance. Within days Lab
personnel had assembled computer communications software and hardware,
critical for real-time conferences and exchanges of medical images with
the South Pole.

In the subfreezing dark, ground crew from the
Amundsen-Scott station had only a few minutes to find and recover
emergency equipment.

"We specified the right equipment for establishing the link and helped
track down the necessary equipment," McParland says, noting that colleagues
at Argonne and Oak Ridge helped locate cold-proof equipment in ready-to-go
condition, including rugged digitizing cameras for use with microscopes.
Berkeley Lab donated two noise-canceling headsets. An Air Force C-141
Starlifter from Washington State carried six 350-pound pallets of medicine
and machinery-plus a bonus bundle of fresh vegetables and mail-to the
South Pole station. The cargo jet had to refuel in mid-air on the last
leg of the 6,375-mile round trip from New Zealand, approach the station
at its challenging 10,000-foot altitude, and find a drop zone marked out
by blazing oil drums in the howling darkness.

On July 11 the big plane buzzed the station twice at 190 miles per hour,
700 feet off the ice. Slowed by parachutes, the pallets slammed home at
60 miles per hour. Flashing strobes and glow patches on the bundles quickly
led the ground crew to the first five, but the cold instantly extinguished
the marker lights and (with trips outside limited to seven minutes at
a time) it took an hour and a half in the sub-freezing night to find the
last package.

"Only one piece didn't make it," says McParland, "a 300-pound Siemens
ultrasound machine that shattered when it hit. But there was a backup
for everything." Within two days, the Polaroid microscope digitizers were
storing images of tissue samples with million-pixel resolution and 10
bits of color. Over the next several months, these were shared during
regular videoconferencing sessions between Dr. Nielsen at the Pole and
a medical panel based in the Midwest, who monitored her progress.

On October 16, weeks earlier than any previous flight to the Pole, a
ski-equipped C-130 from the New York Air National Guard, which provides
logistical support to the U.S. Antarctic program, took advantage of minus-60-degrees-F
weather (just two degrees above the Air Force's safety minimum) and landed
at the Amundsen-Scott station.

Dr. Nielsen was soon on her way home. Since her return to the United
States, the NSF has not disclosed her whereabouts or condition. Without
the remote-collaboration equipment assembled by Berkeley Lab volunteers,
the level of her care during the long Antarctic winter could not have
been as knowledgeable, swift, or sophisticated. -
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